2016 How the Internet Was Invented
In 40 years, the internet has morphed from a military communication network into a vast global cyberspace. And it all started in a California beer garden. 40 years ago this August, a small team of scientists set up a computer terminal at one of its picnic tables and conducted an extraordinary experiment. Over plastic cups of beer, they proved that a strange idea called the internet could work. Internetworking is the problem the internet was invented to solve. Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, who devised the first internet protocol. In the summer of 1976, it started working. They designed the internet to run anywhere: because the US military is everywhere. It maintains nearly 800 bases in more than 70 countries around the world.

The Internet is a "network of networks" of computers. It was born on Oct. 29, 1969, when a UCLA student programmer sent a message from his computer to one at Stanford.

You're at one end, and everybody and everything else are at the other ends. The Internet's value is founded in its technical architecture.

The World Wide Web is the system that allows documents and sites to connect via the Internet, and it was born March 12, 1989. That's when Timothy Berners-Lee, then a fellow at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), wrote "Information Management: A Proposal" (bit.ly/1eBedal), outlining "a universal linked information system." He described much of what the Web has come to be.

The Technical and Political Evolution of the Internet: ECE Lecturer Series - Dave Farber

In the beginning was Vannevar Bush and he sprinkled the seed that grew into the Internet.

Vannevar Bush: As We May Think The Atlantic, 1945.
As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on "The American Scholar," this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge.--THE EDITOR
This has not been a scientist's war; it has been a war in which all have had a part. The scientists, burying their old professional competition in the demand of a common cause, have shared greatly and learned much. It has been exhilarating to work in effective partnership. Now, for many, this appears to be approaching an end. What are the scientists to do next?
For the biologists, and particularly for the medical scientists, there can be little indecision, for their war has hardly required them to leave the old paths. Many indeed have been able to carry on their war research in their familiar peacetime laboratories. Their objectives remain much the same. It is the physicists who have been thrown most violently off stride, who have left academic pursuits for the making of strange destructive gadgets, who have had to devise new methods for their unanticipated assignments. They have done their part on the devices that made it possible to turn back the enemy, have worked in combined effort with the physicists of our allies. They have felt within themselves the stir of achievement. They have been part of a great team. Now, as peace approaches, one asks where they will find objectives worthy of their best. Of what lasting benefit has been man's use of science and of the new instruments which his research brought into existence? First, they have increased his control of his material environment. They have improved his food, his clothing, his shelter; they have increased his security and released him partly from the bondage of bare existence. They have given him increased knowledge of his own biological processes so that he has had a progressive freedom from disease and an increased span of life. They are illuminating the interactions of his physiological and psychological functions, giving the promise of an improved mental health. Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals; it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual. There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers--conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial. Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields, by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an examination calculated to show how much of the previous month's efforts could be produced on call. Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.
The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships. But there are signs of a change as new and powerful instrumentalities come into use. Photocells capable of seeing things in a physical sense, advanced photography which can record what is seen or even what is not, thermionic tubes capable of controlling potent forces under the guidance of less power than a mosquito uses to vibrate his wings, cathode ray tubes rendering visible an occurrence so brief that by comparison a microsecond is a long time, relay combinations which will carry out involved sequences of movements more reliably than any human operator and thousands of times as fast--there are plenty of mechanical aids with which to effect a transformation in scientific records. Two centuries ago Leibnitz invented a calculating machine which embodied most of the essential features of recent keyboard devices, but it could not then come into use. The economics of the situation were against it: the labor involved in constructing it, before the days of mass production, exceeded the labor to be saved by its use, since all it could accomplish could be duplicated by sufficient use of pencil and paper. Moreover, it would have been subject to frequent breakdown, so that it could not have been depended upon; for at that time and long after, complexity and unreliability were synonymous. Babbage, even with remarkably generous support for his time, could not produce his great arithmetical machine. His idea was sound enough, but construction and maintenance costs were then too heavy. Had a Pharaoh been given detailed and explicit designs of an automobile, and had he understood them completely, it would have taxed the resources of his kingdom to have fashioned the thousands of parts for a single car, and that car would have broken down on the first trip to Giza. Machines with interchangeable parts can now be constructed with great economy of effort. In spite of much complexity, they perform reliably. Witness the humble typewriter, or the movie camera, or the automobile. Electrical contacts have ceased to stick when thoroughly understood. Note the automatic telephone exchange, which has hundreds of thousands of such contacts, and yet is reliable. A spider web of metal, sealed in a thin glass container, a wire heated to brilliant glow, in short, the thermionic tube of radio sets, is made by the hundred million, tossed about in packages, plugged into sockets--and it works! Its gossamer parts, the precise location and alignment involved in its construction, would have occupied a master craftsman of the guild for months; now it is built for thirty cents. The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it. A record if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted. Today we make the record conventionally by writing and photography, followed by printing; but we also record on film, on wax disks, and on magnetic wires. Even if utterly new recording procedures do not appear, these present ones are certainly in the process of modification and extension.
[MAJOR snippage].

The backbone of the Internet, FTP (file transfer protocol), celebrates its 40th birthday April 16, 2011 Originally launched as the RFC 114 specification, which was published on 16 April 1971, FTP is arguably even more important today than when it was born. IIf you read RFC 114, it is not the FTP protocol we use today. It's a binary protocol from before people figured out that text-based protocols were easier to understand, write, and debug. The modern FTP protocol learned some things from RFC 114's, but it seems a distant cousin. RFC 454 looks a lot more like today's FTP protocol.
Note that RFC 454 ran over the ARPANET NCP transport protocol. FTP today runs mostly over TCP/IPv4. In the future it will be more common on TCP/IPv6. It has survived two full transplants of the transport layer.

1987 At that time, the Web did not exist, but Gopher, Archie, and Veronica did, and people were using them to ferret out information that was available via the Internet. I've been on the interent since 1991.

http://j.mp/NQtACW Scientific American
Yes, Government Researchers Really Did Invent the Internet.
But perhaps the most damning rebuttal comes from Michael Hiltzik, the author of "Dealers of Lightning," a history of Xerox PARC that Crovitz uses as his main source for material. "While I'm gratified in a sense that he cites my book," writes Hiltzik, "it's my duty to point out that he's wrong. My book bolsters, not contradicts, the argument that the Internet had its roots in the ARPANet, a government project."

Yes, Government Researchers Really Did Invent the Internet July 23, 2012
Michael Moyer is the editor in charge of technology coverage at Scientific American.
“It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet,” writes Gordon Crovitz in an opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal. Most histories cite the Pentagon-backed ARPANet as the Internet’s immediate predecessor, but that view undersells the importance of research conducted at Xerox PARC labs in the 1970s, claims Crovitz. In fact, Crovitz implies that, if anything, government intervention gummed up the natural process of laissez faire innovation. “The Internet was fully privatized in 1995,” says Crovitz, “just as the commercial Web began to boom.” The implication is clear: the Internet could only become the world-changing force it is today once big government got out of the way.
But Crovitz’s story is based on a profound misunderstanding of not only history, but technology. Most egregiously, Crovitz seems to confuse the Internet—at heart, a set of protocols designed to allow far-flung computer networks to communicate with one another — with Ethernet, a protocol for connecting nearby computers into a local network. (Robert Metcalfe, a researcher at Xerox PARC who co-invented the Ethernet protocol, today tweeted tongue-in-cheek “Is it possible I invented the whole damn Internet?”)
The most important part of what we now know of as the Internet is the TCP/IP protocol, which was invented by Vincent Cerf and Robert Kahn. Crovitz mentions TCP/IP, but only in passing, calling it (correctly) “the Internet’s backbone.” He fails to mention that Cerf and Kahn developed TCP/IP while working on a government grant.
Other commenters, including Timothy B. Lee at Ars Technica and veteran technology reporter Steve Wildstrom, have noted that Crovitz’s misunderstandings run deep. He also manages to confuse the World Wide Web (incidentally, invented by Tim Berners Lee while working at CERN, a government-funded research laboratory) with hyperlinks, and an internet—a link between two computers—with THE Internet.
But perhaps the most damning rebuttal comes from Michael Hiltzik, the author “Dealers of Lightning,” a history of Xerox PARC that Crovitz uses as his main source for material. “While I’m gratified in a sense that he cites my book,” writes Hiltzik, “it’s my duty to point out that he’s wrong. My book bolsters, not contradicts, the argument that the Internet had its roots in the ARPANet, a government project.”
In truth, no private company would have been capable of developing a project like the Internet, which required years of R&D efforts spread out over scores of far-flung agencies, and which began to take off only after decades of investment. Visionary infrastructure projects such as this are part of what has allowed our economy to grow so much in the past century. Today’s op-ed is just one sad indicator of how we seem to be losing our appetite for this kind of ambition.

From: "Peter G. Neumann">csl.sri.com
To make a long story short, Crovitz seems to confuse The Internet with internetting and networking, confuse internetting with the ethernet, and somehow miss the fact that Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn were first funded by and then worked for ARPA! Hawaii's AlohaNet (Frank Kuo and Norm Abramson) preceded ethernet, also government funded. SRI's packet-switched radio experiment is generally credited as being the first real "internetworking" demonstration, linking 3 different networks (also government funded), and recently celebrated at the Computer History Museum. Without those impeti or impetuses, might we still have only circuitswitching and even analog telephony?

From Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking bbiw.net
Besides funding the underlying core packet-switching and inter-networking research and the development of most underlying and user-visible core protocols that remain in operation, the US government funded the original infrastructure service providers, via the National Science Foundation's NSFNet backbone and regions networks. Converting these to commercial operations began the commercial Internet.
The article was correct that the PARC team did seminal work in this space too -- and for a time their XNS protocols did provide the basis for a number of other company's networking products, including the ones I worked on at Ungermann-Bass -- but what we use today is a very simple, straight-line continuation of all that government-funded research, starting in the 60s up through the 90s.
Much of what worked in the mid-80s, on the NSFNet/et-al Internet still works on today's Internet.

Download A Piece of Internet History Here's your chance!
In 2007, John Goerzen scraped every gopher site he could find (gopher was a menu-driven text-only precursor to the Web; I got my first online gig programming gopher sites). He saved 780,000 documents, totalling 40GB. Today, most of this is offline, so he's making the entire archive available as a .torrent file; the compressed data is only 15GB. Wanna host the entire history of a medium?

Women's History Month
Hedy Lamarr's Invention Finally Comes of Age - Movie actress Hedy Lamarr, who died at her home in Florida on Jan. 19, 2000 at age 86, co-invented an important technology for radio communications called "frequency hopping." Her intellectual breakthrough will fuel the next great boom in Internet use. What was called "frequency hopping" in the 1940s, when Lamarr and her friend George Antheil developed the idea, is now generally called "spread spectrum" wireless communication. Cordless and wireless phones are spread spectrum devices and uses a version of spread spectrum techniques dependent on Lamarr's and Antheil's innovation. GPS uses spread spectrum too.Also SeeBACKGROUND: HISTORY OF COMPUTERS

PERSONAL MEMORIES
OF ENIAC FEB. 13 2006ENIAC DEBUTS 60 YEARS AGO
ENIAC a Computer that was Built In WWII leading to the creation of The Internet. There were 6 Women Computers known as the "Programmers" that wired ENIAC and literally killed the bug that was messing it up.

CSNET

The Computer Science Network (CSNET) was a computer network developed starting in the late 1970s which linked computer science departments at academic institutions in the United States that were not connected to the ARPANET. It played a significant role in spreading awareness of the ARPANET and was a major milestone on the path to development of the Internet. In 1980, CSNET was funded by the National Science Foundation for an initial three-year period from 1981 to 1984.

Larry Landweber at the University of Wisconsin-Madison prepared the original CSNET proposal, which was originally reviewed by David Crocker who later made key contributions to the development of electronic mail. The proposal gained the support of Vinton Cerf and DARPA. In 1980, the NSF awarded $5 million to launch the network. A stipulation for the award of the contract was that the network needed to become self-sufficient within five years.

By 1981, three sites were connected: University of Delaware, Princeton University, and Purdue University. By 1982, 24 sites were connected expanding to 84 sites by 1984, including one in Israel. Soon thereafter, connections were established to computer science departments in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Korea, and Japan. During this period, a gateway node was installed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to provide access to the ARPANET. CSNET eventually connected more than 180 institutions.CSNET was a forerunner of the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNet) which eventually became a backbone of the Internet. CSNET operated autonomously until 1989, when it merged with Bitnet to form the Corporation for Research and Educational Networking (CREN). By 1991, the growth of the Internet had rendered the CSNET services redundant, and CREN discontinued them.
The CSNET project had three primary components: the Phonenet mail system (Delaware), a name server (Wisconsin), and a TCP/IP-over-X.25 tunnel (Purdue). It was intended as an extension to ARPANET, to which many computer science departments did not have access. CSNET connected with ARPANET using TCP/IP, and ran TCP/IP over X.25, but it also supported departments without sophisticated network connections, using automated dial-up mail exchange. Phonenet allowed an institution to have Unix mail services with the underlying transport mechanism being a loosely-connected phone relay network. The name server allowed manual and automated email address lookup based on various user attributes, e.g., name, title, institution. The X.25 tunneling allowed an institution to connect directly to the ARPANET via a commercial X.25 service (e.g., Telnet), by which the institution's TCP/IP traffic would be tunneled to a CSNET computer that acted as a relay between the ARPANET and the commercial X.25 networks. CSNET was developed on DEC VAX 11/750 and 11/780 systems using BSD Unix, but it grew to support a variety of hardware and OS platforms. CSNET receives 2009 ISOC POSTEL AWARD

From: Suzanne Johnson August 2, 2009
Subject: user perspective on CSNET
John Gilmore's comments on CSNET prompted me to add comments from the perspective of an early corporate user.
In the 80's, the only real means for a corporation (or many educational institutions) to connect to the Internet required that they a.) have a government grant and b.) be able to afford the then considerable cost of
connectivity (basically, purchasing a TIP or IMP). Many educational
institutions did not qualify, and corporations were wary. CSNET changed the equation for these folks, especially corporate entities. CSNET required that the potential applicant prove they did CS related research, and connections were done by PhoneNET (far less expensive than a TIP or an IMP).
I was at Intel at the time, and used CSNET/PhoneNET as "baby's first network connection". The handholding from the CSNET staff was exceptional. Their monitoring and quick action, for example, protected many of us from the effects of the Morris Worm. CSNET participants signed a TOU that precluded commercial or advertising use, but engineering/technical uses were welcome.
Once connected, I watched Intel's use grow at the same exponential rate as the rest of the Internet. Our connectivity outside the company was so much better than internal mail connectivity, that I recall one internal
meeting where the the head of head IT was asked by an engineering manager why it was easier to send email half-way around the globe than it was to send, via the Intel network, to another Intel location in the US. Some of the savings effected by delivering software patches to users via ftp vs. FedEx were so great, we had to cut them by a factor of 10 to make them believable. It was the CSNET experienced that helped to push Intel towards rationalizing their internal network connectivity to an IP based network.
I was fortunate to serve as a CSNET Exec Committee member for a number of years, and saw and heard of similar effects on other corporations. Without CSNET, it would have been a many times slower journey for corporate connectivity to the Internet.
So, Thanks Again, CSNET!!!!! --Suzanne

The ARPANET was NOT the Internet. The ARPANET was a noteable step in packet communications, but it was a single network -- an internet only occurs when multiple networks are interconnected. On the evening of October 29, 1969 the first data travelled between two nodes of the ARPANET, a key ancestor of the Internet. Even more important, this was one of the first big trials of a then-radical idea: Networking computers to each other. The men who symbolically turned the key on the connected world we know today were two young programmers, Charley Kline at UCLA and Bill Duvall at SRI in Northern California, using special equipment made by BBN in Cambridge, Massachussetts. 2009 40th Anniversary of the Net - October 29, 1969 VIDEO

SRI and ARC

Two Apple Macintosh Plus mice, 1986 Some years later it was learned that they had licensed it to Apple for something like $40,000." In 1967, Engelbart applied for, and in 1970 he received a patent for the wooden shell with two metal wheels (computer mouse U.S. Patent 3,541,541), describing it in the patent application as an "X-Y position indicator for a display system". Engelbart later revealed that it was nicknamed the "mouse" because the tail came out the end. He conceived and developed many of his user interface ideas back in the mid-1960s, long before the personal computer revolution, at a time when most individuals were kept away from computers, and could only use computers through intermediaries. Engelbart showcased many of his and ARC's inventions in 1968 at the so-called mother of all demos.Because Engelbart's research and tool-development for online collaboration and interactive human-computer interfaces was partially funded by ARPA. SRI's ARC became involved with the ARPANET (the precursor of the Internet).

DARPA was, in fact, America's first space agency.
It was formed as a rapid response to the Soviet Union's launch of the first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957 as a semi-autonomous research and development arm of the Pentagon. Then as now, it was a nimble, quick-moving organization with a minimal bureaucracy and no laboratories of its own. Instead, its 100 or so program managers cook up ideas to farm out to universities, private companies and other organizations to do the work of bending metal and writing code to make them work (or not). DARPA's director is a presidential appointee who oversees six program offices that are working on everything from self-programming computers and direct neural control of machines to breakthroughs in renewable energy and aerospace. At $3 billion, DARPA's budget is a mere one-sixth of NASA's and a paltry one-half of one percent of the overall Defense budget. About half of DARPA's work is secret.

The Internet was developed in the 1960s by DARPA actually,with 4 nodes and 4 computers (see some good maps of the evolving net, starting from 1 node and 1 computer in Sept. 69) by 1971, the net was in heavy use by most of the serious researchers in the country.

The original motivation of the ARPANET was to link together DARPA-supported computer science researchers, to allow them to share resources and information. It was a wild success that changed the way work was organized and performed in that research community.

The most logical date of origin of the Internet is January 1, 1983, when the ARPANET officially switched from the NCP protocol to TCP/IP. It was the very success of the ARPANET that created demand among non-DARPA-funded computer science researchers - for a comparable capability. The (D) was added and stands for Defense. All those NSF-funded researchers were watching their DARPA-funded cubicle-mates get a lot more work done. The result was first CSnet and the various supercomputer networks (as well as a few other field-specific networks for high-energy physics folks and such) ultimately leading to the NSFnet. Linked together, these various networks formed the Internet.
It's also worth noting that, during the 70s, an increasing amount of unclassified military traffic - from bases that had military labs - started flowing over the ARPANET. It simply worked a lot better than the antiquated messaging systems the military had in use. This created demand for splitting the ARPANET into two separate, built linked, networks - the research-community ARPANET and the MILNET. It also lead to several separate networks carrying classified traffic.

ARPANET WAS NOT AN INTERNET.The 20th anniversary of the Internet by Bob Braden Dec 14, 2002 We ought not to let pass unnoticed the impending 20th anniversary of the Internet. The most logical date of origin of the Internet is January 1, 1983, when the ARPANET officially switched from the NCP protocol to TCP/IP. Six months later, the ARPANET was split into the two subnets ARPANET and MILNET, which were connected by Internet gateways* (routers).
The planning for the January 1983 switchover was fully documented in Jon Postel in RFC 801. The week-by-week progress of the transition was reported in a series of 15 RFCs, in the range RFC 842 - RFC 876, by UCLA student David Smallberg. There may still be a few remaining T shirts that read, "I Survived the TCP/IP Transition". People sometimes question that any geeks would have been in machine rooms on January 1. Believe it!! Some geeks got very little sleep for a few days (and that was before the work "geek" was invented, I believe.) So, on New Year's Eve, hoist one for the 20th anniversary of the Internet.

Bob Braden says:
* Routers brought to you by Bob Hinden of BBN.
** Prominent survivors included Dan Lynch of Interop fame. And of course Vint Cerf was working the Levers of Power at ARPA.

2004 - 35th Anniversary of Arpanet now known as the Internet ARPAnet history background by Bob Taylor

In February of 1966 I initiated the ARPAnet project. I was Director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) from late '65 to late '69. There were only two people involved in the decision to launch the ARPAnet: my boss, the Director of ARPA Charles Herzfeld, and me.
From 1962 to 1970, beginning with J.C.R. Licklider, Ivan Sutherland, and then me, IPTO funded several of the first projects devoted to the creation of interactive computing -- then referred to as time-sharing. In '64 - '65, I witnessed that within each local site when users were first connected by a time-sharing system, a community of people with common interests began to discover one another and interact through the medium of the computer. I was struck by the fact that this was a wonderfully new and powerful phenomenon.
The next obvious step was to connect those sites with an interactive network. To me, computing was about communication, not arithmetic. Hence the ARPAnet. This theme is elaborated in a paper Lick and I wrote in 1968 entitled, "The Computer as a Communications Device". Google can find it for you. On the last couple of pages there is a scenario that is reminiscent of today's Internet. Numerous untruths have been disseminated about events surrounding the origins of the ARPAnet. Here are some facts:

The creation of the ARPAnet was not motivated by considerations of war. The ARPAnet was created to enable folks with common interests to connect to one another through interactive computing even when widely separated by geography.

The singularly most important contribution to the architectural design of the ARPAnet/Internet came from Wesley Clark: the interface message processor (IMP). Wes is the designer of the LINC which was arguably the first personal computer. Wes' ARPAnet concept ensured the critically valuable distributed architecture of the ARPAnet. Prior to Wes' contribution, Larry Roberts, whom I hired in Dec '66 to be ARPAnet's program manager, was considering a single, central ARPAnet control computer at a military base in Nebraska. Fortunately, Wes quickly disabused Roberts of this notion.

The most significant role in actually building the ARPAnet was played by Frank Heart and his Bolt, Beranek & Newman team: Severo Ornstein, Will Crowther, Bob Barker, Bernie Cosell, Dave Walden, and Bob Kahn.

Two suspicious claims relating to the ARPAnet were an important part of the case for awarding the 2001 Draper Prize to Kahn and Kleinrock.

Kahn has claimed far and wide to be "responsible for the systems design of the ARPAnet" while a member of the BB&N team. Since no other team member agrees, I doubt the validity of this claim.

Roberts and Kleinrock (close friends since college) began to claim in 1995, more than 30 years after the fact, that Kleinrock invented packet switching. Most of us believe that Donald Davies in England and Paul Baran in the U.S. independently invented packet switching in the early '60s.

I believe these two claims are false but they are recorded as facts on the web sites of the National Academy of Engineering and the Computer History Museum. The worst property of self-promotion is that it takes credit away from the people who actually made the contributions. Roberts, Kahn, and Kleinrock have, however, made other important contributions. These can only be tarnished by extravagant claims.
Packet switching is an important part of modern networking, but it is not the only key piece. The multiplicity of the applications and the openness of the standards also played critical roles in ARPAnet development, as did Steve Crocker's initiation and management of the RFC process.
I believe the first internet was created at Xerox PARC, circa '75, when we connected, via PUP, the Ethernet with the ARPAnet. PUP (PARC Universal Protocol) was instrumental later in defining TCP (ask Metcalfe or Shoch, they were there).
For the internet to grow, it also needed a networked personal computer, a graphical user interface with WYSIWYG properties, modern word processing, and desktop publishing. These, along with the Ethernet, all came out of my lab at Xerox PARC in the '70s, and were commercialized over the next 20 years by Adobe, Apple, Cisco, Microsoft, Novell, Sun and other companies that were necessary to the development of the Internet.The ARPAnet was not an internet. An internet is a connection between two or more computer networks. The ARPAnet, with help from thousands of people, slowly evolved into the Internet. Without the ARPAnet, the Internet would have been a much longer time in coming. ACT ONE celebration of ARPANET 20 at UCLA, I wrote up an article recording what had been said there. The article was published in American Scientist in November 1989.

Robert Kahn started the Internet project at DARPA in the early 1970s and Vint Cerf ran it from 1976-1982. By 1983, the technology had matured to the point that DARPA transitioned the ARPANET to the TCP/IP protocols and the operational Internet was put in place.

1963 film about early time-sharing at MIT This film was made available by Professor Morna Findlay of Edinburgh University. According to mail from Corby, the movie was taped on 3" magnetic tape on May 9, 1963 and aired on WGBH-TV on May 16, 1963.
Dag Spicer, Archivist at the Computer History Museum, informs me that they have obtained permission from MIT and WGBH to post a 1964 TV episode of John Fitch, Science Reporter, featuring MIT's CTSS time-sharing system and an interview with MIT Professor Fernando J Corbato.

INTERNET SOCIETY
a professional membership society with more than 100 organization and over 20,000 individual members in over 180 countries. It provides leadership in addressing issues that confront the future of the Internet, and is the organization home for the groups responsible for Internet infrastructure standards, including the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB). 1775 Wiehle Ave., Suite 102,
Reston, VA, USA 20190-5108
Tel: +1 703 326 9880 Fax: +1 703 326 9881

WATCH1972 ARPANET Film about Computer Networks A documentary film about the history of the ARPANET and birth of the Internet.
The Heralds of Resource Sharing
It's all about moving the information off of the paper, the costs of storing it, the labor costs, and giving people access.The printing press handled the problem of copying information but now the networks handle distributing it. Also find a list of the speakers and links to some biographical information in the film. [source] Note the now obsolete electronic moog music used for the film.

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The future of Data summary starts 20:00 Non-speaking: Daniel L. Murphy: (Behind the titles, several other times, best about 15:44)

Suzanne Johnson March 19, 2006 1972 ARPANET Film (was: "an amazing film...")
Without going too far down memory lane, [...snip] I've got to say that amid the "prehistoric technology" in this film is a reference to network management and control, which has, in my opinion, never developed to the same point since that time. One possible exception would be the Ricochet network in the mid-nineties.
I was on the system staff at Sumex-Aim (at Stanford) back in the early-seventies. We were the first non-defense funded application site on the ARPANET. One day the system staff were all in the offices which were located several blocks from the machine room containing our computer and IMP. We all started getting IMP shut- down messages on our terminals. "IMP going down in 30 minutes for 10 minutes", with a count-down of minutes after that. We all looked at each other and asked who scheduled the shut down. None of us had.
Then someone remembered an 800 number we'd been given when we connected to the ARPANET. It was for a "network control center somewhere back east". We called the number and asked the person who answered what was going on. Not expecting a coherent answer, we were surprised when the person made a quick check and told us: "your IMP has been having intermittent problems for about a week. It finally was able to make a diagnosis of which board was creating the problem.
We've scheduled and controlled the downtime and a technician is there waiting to switch boards. You will be back up again in 10 minutes." By the time we all regained our composure, and sent someone to the machine room, the IMP was fixed and in the process of coming back up.
We then recalled that as a part of being connected to the ARPANET, we'd had to ensure that access to the IMP was available at all times to ARPANET technicians (we'd given a key to them).
Also see: "From Barnstorming to Boeing - Transforming the Internet Into a Lifeline Utility" with the notes

Interview with Susan Estrada - Starting Up the Internet
An original developer of the Internet, Susan Estrada founded CERFnet, an Internet service provider, in 1988. During her 5-year tenure as the CERFnet executive director, she was instrumental in CERFnet's user growth from 25 university members to hundreds of corporate members and thousands of individual users including an annual profit. In 1993, Susan wrote Connecting to the Internet, An O'Reilly Buyer's Guide. Also in 1993, Susan founded Aldea Communications, Inc. which focuses on advising companies and universities on strategic telecommunications strategies. Its client list includes the University of California, Hughes, AT&T InterNIC, Network Solutions, Cisco Systems, AT&T Jens, Pacific Bell, and Bell South. Susan is an elected Trustee of the Internet Society, a founder of the Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX), a former area director for the Internet Engineering Software Group (IESG) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). She currently is an appointed member of Pacific Telesis's Telecommunications Consumer Advisory Panel and the U.S. Federal Networking Council's Advisory Committee (FNCAC). -- Interview by Nic Paget-Clarke.

The Public-Access Computer Systems Review (PACS Review), one of the first open access journals published on the Internet. In turn, a PACS Review experiment resulted in the establishment of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography in October 1996, which led to the establishment of Digital Scholarship in April 2005. See "A Look Back at 21 Years as an Open Access Publisher" for
details.

ABOUT NETORKS

The Internet Protocol Journal (IPJ) is published quarterly by Cisco Systems. The journal is not intended to promote any specific products or services, but rather is intended to serve as an informational and educational resource for engineering professionals involved in the design, development, and operation of public and private internets and intranets. The journal carries tutorial articles ("What is...?") as well as implementation / operation articles ("How to..."). It provides readers with technology and standardization updates for all levels of the protocol stack and serves as a forum for discussion of all aspects of internetworking.

The Cook Report has been published since 1992 by the former Director of the US Congress OffiIt monitors the increasing convergence between voice and data networks as it follows the technologies that are being used by the next generation telcos. ce of Technology Assessment of the NREN.

New Academic Ideas ~ Noel Chiappa MIT
All this neat packet networking stuff only exists now (2007) because for many years (during Baran's first RAND work ca. 1960-64, then during the ARPANet development in the late 60's-early-70's, and then the early internetwork work in the 1975-1982 time-frame) this stuff was all funded by "bureaucrats in DC".
There was *no* commercial market for any of this stuff back then, so there was no other way to make it happen. (A fact of which I am well aware, because I was one of the first people - maybe the first, actually - to make money selling IP routers commercially - and that was in 1984 or so, almost 10 years after the bureacrats starting putting money into TCP/IP.)
In fact, to add a nice topping of irony, many commercial communications people of the day (circa 1980) said much the same things about TCP/IP that they are now saying about other efforts: I distinctly recall the TCP/IP people being told to "roll up our toy academic network" (and yes, they explicitly and definitely used the work "academic") and go home.

WAY BACK WHEN THIS IS HOW THINGS STARTED

Leonard Kleinrock, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles who is credited with sending the first message -- "lo," for "log on" -- from one computer to another in 1969.

There's a 1995 program featuring Eric Schmidt, plus the rep for the then-white house, and the official spokespuppet for the cable industry, all talking about the "nightmare scenario" of how "only 2 or 3 major operators" would *never* dominate the industry thus the "inconceivable" need for net neutrality regulation.
Eric called it right on the mark, even in retrospect. (That program also features Marshall Rose and me talking about ecommerce transactions and even a brief screen showing what the first facility on the net that took money from strangers looked like.Google or Internet Archive

Nov. 3 1992 On the day that Bill Clinton is first elected U.S. president, there are 50 pages on the World Wide Web, which is run by all of 26 reasonably reliable servers, NCSA's having just been added.

Wendy Grossman: Carbon-dating the Internet
Friday 08 October 2004, 12:33
|THE DEMENTED three-year-old that rampages through all of Microsoft's software - My Music; MY Pictures; MY COMPUTER - seems to have been let loose on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the Internet, which is around now sometime. Or isn't. It depends whose publicity department you listen to.
The year most people seem to be dating the Internet to is 1969, when the ARPAnet was first connected up. It's certainly tempting to set it then. That's the network that's generally agreed to be the most important precursor of the Internet. October 29 is the date [2]UCLA has chosen for the official celebration. That's commemorating September 2, the day the first Internet message was sent from Leonard Kleinrock's UCLA computer lab.
That of course makes that date entirely correct as far as UCLA is concerned. But is that the [3]Big Bang that created the Internet? Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyons, in their 1996 book Where Wizards Stay Up Late, document the efforts of Boston-based [4]Bolt Beranek Newman to create the IMP machines that Kleinrock's lab used. BBN was where, in 1971, Ray Tomlinson inaugurated person-to-person network email and chose the now-ubiquitous @ symbol. But we can't take either 1969 or 1971 as the beginning of email itself, since that was first created for the [5] time-sharing systems of the 1960s. A Personal view: Impact of Email Work at The Rand Corporation in the mid-1970S We could go back a few years earlier, to when Paul Baran, working at Rand Corporation, and Donald Davies, working at the UK's [6]National Physical Laboratory independently came up with the idea of packet switching. That was a completely new way of looking at transmitting data across a network, and is the heart of the way the Internet as we know it operates.
Thing is, packet-switching could have remained just an idea. The telephone network, still the biggest network in the world, doesn't work that way. The TCP/IP protocols that arguably define the Internet weren't invented until 1974, by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn. If you want to go, say, from the publication of their paper, you could pick May 1974, as Cerf mentions in a [7]recent column. That would make the Internet 30 years old. But obviously it would be more logical to date from when the ARPAnet moved to using TCP/IP, which was 1983. In which case - glory be! -- the Internet turned 21 years old in January. That would mean it's newly an adult, although you'd never know it from the behavior of some of the people on it. Perhaps they're still out on the now obligatory American coming-of-age pub crawl.
That year - 1983 - is a good pick for another reason. That's the year the [8]domain name system as we now know it was designed and deployed. Without that relatively user-friendly veneer email would have been slower to take off, and the commercial Web as we know it might not exist at all. The domain name system did as much or more to make the Internet usable as graphical Web browsers did. Though 1969 can answer that by pointing out that the first-ever RFC, the Requests for Comments that define Internet standards, is dated [9]April 7, 1969. That gives UCLA the right year, but puts it six months behind schedule.
Of course, to most people the Internet means the Web and email (and sometimes email also means the Web). In which case, you could go for 1989, when [10]Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, invented it. That's straightforward enough. Except that the Web didn't really take off until graphical browsers turned up, which is not, as Netscape (now an AOL division) might like to claim, 1994, when the first version of Netscape was released, nor its precursor, [11]Mosaic, which came out in 1993. When Mosaic came out, there were already a number of browser projects competing for attention, of which the earliest were [12]Viola and Erwise, which were released within a month of each other in 1992.
There are still more dates you could consider: 1995, the year Bill Gates got net; 1979, the year Usenet was created; 1985, the year the supercomputing centers were created and linked to form NSFnet, which became an important Internet backbone; 1991, the year that acceptable use policies were changed to allow commercial traffic on the Internet;
1994, the year that the big online information services - AOL, CompuServe, Delphi - set up their Internet gateways.
In 1998, I appeared at a conference called "Technological Visions", hosted at the University of Southern California, and as part of the exercise felt required to produce some predictions. The papers eventually appeared earlier this year - ah, Internet time - in a [13]book. Six years is of course long enough to look really silly, but one prediction seems clearly to have come true. I said that it would take constant vigilance to ensure that history did not record that Bill Gates invented the Internet. I think the general reaction was, "Nah, nah, come on, these people are still alive, and this stuff is all written down."
Yes. By PR departments. Who take the view that the Internet started when their company made its memorable contribution. In which case, I say to hell with it, the Internet is 13 years and four months old, because I got online in June 1991. So there.

Feb. 4 1994 "Newsday" (US), a Long Island, NY, newspaper, publishes this sentence: "Following the lead of their sister in the motion-picture business, "content providers" like Paramount Publishing are aggressively seeking to buy up electronic rights and submarkets." Guy Jackson, Editor of "The Cambridge International Dictionary of English," finds this the earliest U.S. citation for "content provider" in the Cambridge International corpus, noting "the use of quotation marks, which indicates that the term was not yet widely known."

World Wide Web Consortium http://www.w3.org/
Founded in 1994, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been primarily concerned with developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web. To do so, they draw on a set of international professionals and experts throughout the field of computer science and related fields. The W3C is led by Tim Berners-Lee, who directs the project and who was also responsible for inventing the World Wide Web. Carbon-dating the Internet

Mar. 1 1995 "The Daily Telegraph" (UK) quotes a Mr. Connell that "People want better control over their lives, they want to see things when it's convenient for them, and we will give time and attention to linking up with existing content providers." Guy Jackson finds this the earliest British citation for "content provider" in the Cambridge International corpus.

The Beginning of the Erate
Schools, libraries order more than $2 billion in Internet hookups Copyright 1998 Nando.net
Schools and libraries have requested $2.02 billion in the discounted hookups to the Internet that are becoming available under a new government program.